Previews

The Godfather II

You've spent enough time knocking around the lower echelons, now it's time to be the Don.

Spiffy:

A wealth of rackets to capture and capitalize on; rich crew customization; good blend of strategy and action.

Iffy:

Reese's Peanut Butter Cup approach may not work on gamers that want either action or strategy, but not both.

While the the first Godfather game focused on your experiences rising through the ranks of the Corleone family's crime syndicate, EA has decided to take things a bit further in The Godfather II. Developers on hand at EA's Summer Showcase 2008 batted around the tagline "act like a mobster, think like a Don" repeatedly, but after a thorough discussion of the underlying strategic gameplay, which builds on the traditional action-oriented gameplay of the first game, that phrase seems less like a catchy hook and more like an inventive approach. To help express the element of tactical play incorporated into The Godfather II, EA invited us to play a surprisingly complicated yet easy to pick-up-and-play card game based on the AI used to guide the decisions of rival crime lords.

Don of War

The Godfather II opens with your ascension to Don-hood thanks to Michael Corleone's endorsement. As such, you have control of la famiglia and can command your entire crew of Corleones as well as induct new talent as the game progresses. You'll need to judiciously use these criminal assets to grow the family business by seizing, incapacitating or destroying unfriendly rackets. To facilitate the process of leading the family and give you a suitably broad view of the areas in contention, The Godfather II debuts a new map that highlights various dens of iniquity as well as provides vital statistics on each, such as which criminal empire currently controls them and how big a force is employed in their defense. This map will eventually grow to encompass all three of The Godfather II's cities of operation, which include New York (naturally), Miami and even Havana, Cuba.

All of that information is of vital importance as all of the other lawless organizations will be vying for control of new rackets as well. So, while you are busily hacking away at a competitor's money-laundering racket, a rival operation may choose to strike at one of your gambling rackets or nullify one of your gun-running rackets with a bomb. It pays to know what your enemies are up to so that you can hit them where and when it hurts the most... crippling a foe is dependent on your ability to navigate and manipulate the landscape of crime.

Executive Producer Hunter "The Don" Smith demonstrated the importance of rackets with a special card game designed specifically to explore the possible behavior of The Godfather II's rival syndicates. See, holding all of the rackets of a certain type (like gun-running, gambling, drugs or chop shops) results in a monopoly and confers the special benefits of controlling an entire segment of illegal industry (mostly bonuses to your crew's abilities and increased revenue). As such, all heads of organized crime are constantly vying for control of new rackets that will benefit them most, while also keeping an eye out for threats to their own interests. In the card game, this is represented by a set of cards representing the various available rackets and each player must choose how to spend their resources, be they money or gangland soldiers and enforcers. Along the way, unspoken and fragile alliances between crooks sometimes form and it is common to watch a criminal organization falter under the feeding frenzy that ensues as soon as first blood is drawn.

It is important to note, however, that this card game won't appear in The Godfather II in its physical form; it was presented merely to show off the under-the-hood mechanics that govern the game's AI.